type of conscious experience. Just as
the eye sees no gap in its field of vision corresponding to the "blind
spot" of the retina, but carries its impression over this area, so
memory sees no lacuna in the past, but carries its image of conscious
life over each of the forgotten spaces.

Sometimes this process of filling in gaps in the past becomes more
complete. Thus, for example, in recalling a particular night a week or
so ago, I instinctively represent it to myself as so many hours of lying
in bed with the waking sensations appropriate to the circumstances, as
those of bodily warmth and rest, and of the surrounding silence and
darkness.

It is apparent that I cannot conceive myself apart from some mode of
conscious experience. In thinking of myself in any part of the past or
future in which there is actually no consciousness, or of which the
conscious content is quite unknown to me, I necessarily imagine myself
as consciously experiencing something. If I picture myself under any
definitely conceived circumstances, I irresistibly import into my mental
image the feelings appropriate to these surroundings. In this way,
people tend to imagine themselves after death as lying in the grave,
feeling its darkness and its chilliness. If the circumstances of the
time are not distinctly represented, the conception of the conscious
experience which constitutes that piece of the ego is necessarily vague,
and seems generally to resolve itself into a representation of ourselves
as dimly _self-conscious_. What this consciousness of self consists of
is a point that will be taken up presently.

_Illusions with respect to Personal Identity._

It would seem to follow from these errors in imaginatively filling up
our past life, that our consciousness of personal identity is by no
means the simple and exact process which it is commonly supposed to be.
I have already remarked that the very fact of there being so large a
region of the irrevocable in our past experience proves our
consciousness of personal continuity to be largely a matter of
inference, or of imaginative conjecture, and not simply of immediate
recollection. Indeed, it may be said that our power of ignoring whole
regions of the past and of leaping complacently over huge gaps in our
memory and linking on conscious experience with conscious experience,
involves an illusory sense of continuity, and so far of personal
identity. Thus, our ordinary image of our past life, if on